The sinister clean-eating trend spreading through boarding schools

It’s the food movement that has captured the imagination of a generation of schoolgirls. But does ‘clean eating’ provide a cover for serious eating disorders? And what are England’s top educational establishments doing about it?

There was a simple solution to surviving a fairly revolting lunch at my West Country school: fill your blazer pockets with stacks of white bread from the dining room, return to the kitchen at the house, toast it and slather it in Nutella.This was the same school where a girl broke into the tuck shop with a hockey stick, such was her need for a sugar fix. And so it was in girls’ schools across England in those Edenic pre-Instagram years before anyone had uttered the words ‘clean eating’ or ‘Have you seen my spiraliser?’

I watch when girls have their leisure time now and they often don’t even opt for a cheese and cucumber sandwich any more – they would see that as a bad thing to eat, which is so dreadful,’ says Fionnuala Kennedy, deputy head, pastoral, at Wimbledon High School. At the beginning of the academic year she wrote to parents asking them to resist ‘that middle-class thing [of] talking about cutting out food groups and clean eating’. She wanted to put a stop to food becoming a ‘moral choice, where there is good and bad food, right and wrong food’.

We all know the cliché of girls’ schools being hotbeds for eating disorders – girls longing to be popular, longing to be accepted, longing to be perfect, all contributing to a subculture of peer pressure that encourages an unrealistic body image. But this means that the schools are well tuned to identifying an issue early and ensuring students get treated. Where anorexia and bulimia might once have been top of the agenda at these schools, eating problems can now be hidden under a subtler guise: the clean-eating movement.

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‘It is a major problem, fuelling disordered eating and unhappiness,’ says psychiatrist Dr Adrienne Key at the Chelsea and Harley Street Eating Disorder Service. ‘With all of these fads, if an individual is vulnerable to an eating disorder, then this type of eating can trigger it. And of course, the younger age group is the most impressionable. They’re following their peers, and in an all-female environment these things get talked about more – they can catch on at a rate of knots.’

It’s the movement’s ‘healthy’ image that makes it so very tricksy. ‘I think the worry is that for young people, where controlling food can meet an emotional need, what clean eating does is give you a respectable way to do that,’ says Rani Tandon, deputy head (pastoral) at Tudor Hall. ‘They’re living in a culture where their parents and peers are very vigilant about eating disorders, and so to be able to control your food for another reason can be a more comfortable place to be.’

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Clean eating – in its simplest form – is about choosing whole foods that have not been (or are minimally) processed. It is endorsed on Instagram and YouTube with images of cauliflower ‘rice’, courgetti and chia seeds. Initially leading the charge was Ella Mills (née Woodward), with her Deliciously Ella brand (1.2m Instagram followers), but when the movement experienced a backlash last year from doctors questioning the scientific credibility of some of the ‘diets’, including Dr Giles Yeo in an episode of the BBC’s Horizon called ‘Clean Eating – The Dirty Truth’, Mills admitted that the term clean eating had taken a wayward turn. She deleted it from her blog and has since distanced herself from the phrase. ‘When I first read the term, it meant natural, unprocessed,’ she said.

‘Now it means fad.’ Similarly, the Hemsley sisters, Jasmine and Melissa, who promote ‘gluten-, grain- and refined-sugar-free alternatives to daily staples’, rejected the phrase and issued a statement after Horizon saying: ‘We don’t believe in absolutes and no one way of eating suits everyone.’

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Another heroine of the movement was Jordan Younger, the self-styled ‘Blonde Vegan’, who sold 40,000 copies of her $25 (£18) ‘cleanse’ meal plan – despite having no qualifications as a nutritionist – until it became apparent that her gluten-free, refined-sugar-free, oil-free, grain-free, plant-based raw vegan diet was making her ill. Her hair was falling out and her periods had stopped, and, after seeking psychological help, she has since rebranded as ‘The Balanced Blonde’.

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The reputation of this movement may have been tarnished, but it shows no signs of losing momentum, especially among teenage girls. ‘A lot of those who are strongly in favour of the clean-eating trends are very attractive young women – and that’s exactly the kind of person that teenagers aspire to be,’ says Tandon at Tudor Hall. ‘The subliminal message is – eat this and you’ll look like me. I’m sure that’s not necessarily what they’re trying to put out there, but it makes it a very appealing idea to young girls.’

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A lower-sixth-former at Heathfield tells me how friends are ‘inspired’ by Ella Mills’s story, recounting it in detail: in 2011, the now 26-year-old was diagnosed with a heart condition that caused her nervous system to struggle, among other problems. Conventional treatment wasn’t working, but by adopting a plant-based diet she could manage her illness without medication. It’s a compelling tale – but is there a possibility that too much emphasis can be put on the power of food, that the messages can be taken to the extreme? ‘That is a risk,’ the lower-sixth-former acknowledges quietly.

Harley Street child and adolescent dietitian Ana-Kristina Skrapac is more forthright in her scepticism. ‘The clean-eating message is about avoiding certain foods, implying you will feel cleaner by following the diet, and that’s not useful language for impressionable young people, whether girls or boys,’ she says. ‘It’s promoting veganism, which is fine if you’re an adult past growing stage, and if you’re informed and going to supplement your diet in the necessary ways. But if you’re a young teenager, you’re probably just going to hang on to a few messages. The young people I see in clinic, who have experimented with clean eating, all struggle to meet their nutritional needs and seem to use it as a way to restrict their intake or avoid foods. A better message is that you can eat everything in moderation and be healthy – but that just doesn’t sell well.’

‘I think it’s impossible at the moment to not be slightly more health-conscious,’ says a Wimbledon High School sixth-former, estimating that 30 per cent of her year group are vegetarian, or ‘semi-vegetarian’, and five or 10 girls in the sixth form are completely vegan (although often citing animal rights as their reason). But that doesn’t stop girls flocking to the Victorian Café in Wimbledon for their fill of panini at lunchtime, or similarly the girls at Heathfield relishing their tea of cupcakes and muffins at 4.15pm. Indeed, asked what her favourite school supper is, one 15-year-old Tudor Hall girl replies without skipping a beat, ‘chicken goujons’. ‘There’s definitely a scale of people who honestly couldn’t care less to people who are very health-conscious and really keep an eye on what they’re eating,’ says the Wimbledon sixth-former.

With social media as clean eating’s most potent weapon, there seems to be little distinction between boarding and day schools when it comes to its impact. ‘The ubiquity of social media makes it a level playing field – it doesn’t matter where you’re watching your YouTube videos from,’ adds Fionnuala Kennedy at Wimbledon High. ‘But I suppose at least at a boarding school you are never going to be allowed to eat just a kale leaf for supper – because you’re being watched.’

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Boarding schools may have the advantage of a level of surveillance at mealtimes, but spotting alarming behaviour is a priority across the board. ‘We do see more girls who say, “I don’t want to eat the school dinners”, because they don’t know how it’s been cooked or where the ingredients come from, and we normally work with the students on a one-to-one basis when we have situations like this,’ says Sandrine Paillasse, deputy head (director of pastoral care) at St Paul’s Girls’ School, where they are amending PSHE (personal, social, health and economic education) and general-studies modules to factor in clean-eating trends. If problems escalate, staff, parents and the medical team are informed so that girls can be monitored.

At Heathfield, all new girls meet the catering team at the beginning of the year, to be introduced to the different food on offer. ‘Girls can be quite open about talking about what food they like or dislike and so this is a good way to catch things very early on,’ says headmistress Marina Gardiner Legge. And Heathfield’s director of pastoral and co-curricular activities, Kathryn de Ferrer, adds: ‘If we have a girl who suddenly starts to say, “Oh, I can’t possibly eat that because it’s been cooked in butter”, we arrange for her to meet our head of catering to talk about it, and usually that is enough to satisfy her that actually everything is very healthy and we need variety in our diet.’

Similarly, at Tudor Hall, Tandon says: ‘If a girl suddenly said, “I’m vegan today”, I’d be saying, “Right, so I’m going to talk to your mum about it first.” I’m not anti-veganism, or saying they have to sit and eat their meat and two veg – it’s just a case of making sure that the decision they’ve made is thought through.’

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Appealing to the girls’ intellect is the line of action at Wimbledon High. ‘Because our girls are seriously bright, we try and appeal to their heads, as well as their hearts,’ says Kennedy. ‘Body-image and mental-health campaigner Natasha Devon was the one who pointed out to them that the dieting industry is a business that’s interested in you really not having a healthy attitude to food, so that your weight yo-yos, and you’re constantly on and off diets.’ Having sixth-formers on hand to talk through the impact of these eating trends with younger students, away from the teachers, is popular practice. Heathfield has boosted its mental-health initiative by taking a lead from Australia’s ‘Flourishing at School’ programme, which aims to provide preventative mental-health assistance, via an in-depth questionnaire and follow-up sessions.

But perhaps the best way to promote healthy eating is to offer menus that make most hotel buffets look like a Nineties service station. ‘A salad bar doesn’t mean a limp lettuce leaf and a tomato any more,’ says Kennedy at Wimbledon High. Tandon at Tudor Hall remembers food being dolloped to her through a hole in the wall as a teenager at school; on the day we speak she had eaten ‘a rocket and salmon salad, chickpeas, avocado, blue cheese and fig...’ But there’s also fish and chips on Friday, sausage sandwiches at breakfast and, as one Downe House girl assures me, despite a push for rice cakes and smoothies in the tuck shop, ‘there’s still a lot of chocolate around – otherwise not many people would be buying anything.’

Bulgur wheat or brownie, for Kennedy this is about dissuading pupils from associating any food with being bad. ‘And that’s a really difficult thing to achieve, because it’s so embedded in our language,’ she says. ‘I will find myself saying, “Oh, I’m going to be a bit naughty and have some chips”, but I just think there needs to be a rallying cry to women for us all to stop talking like this. There are other things for us to invest our time and energy into worrying about.’